"Your Daily Tripod" reflects the personal Fourth Day journeys of its authors and editors. We are happy to have companions like you share in this project. Our prayer is that these reflections will invite and inspire your Fourth Day journey of Piety, Study and Action as much as writing or editing them inspires our journey and brings us all close moments with Jesus and our neighbors.

Saturday, January 03, 2015

Only the Ordinary is Extraordinary

Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord
shines upon you. See, darkness covers
the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples; but upon you the LORD shines, and
over you appears his glory. Nations
shall walk by your light, and kings by the shining radiance of your dawning.
Isaiah 60:1-3

And behold, the star that they had
seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place
where the child was. They were overjoyed
at seeing the star, and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his
mother. Matthew 2:9B-11A

Piety

We all follow
our stars. The richness of a vision, a
dream is energizing. The energizer bunny
is the ease with which we move from one moment of life to another. Discovering in each moment the possibility of
a fullness of God’s love for us. The
rising star grabbed the imagination magi. For them, it suggested the birth of a king. A Chinese legend holds that one, or more than
one, of the magi came from China. That
means they would have been on a two-year trip -- which would make sense based
on why Herod thought that Christ might have been born two years before. The three gifts they bring traditionally—gold,
frankincense, and myrrh—are gifts that reflect a vision of the life of the
newborn savior. For me, Gold is for his
kingship; myrrh for his anointing at burial; incense for his worship as God—these
symbols mean whatever our hearts tell us. We look at the journey of the magi and realize
our own journeys of life as we go from birth to our salvation. Our piety brings our journey together with
Christ; it gives the deeper meaning to life for which we are all searching.

Study

Even as we
look at our journeys of life, we realize that we have to have something really
worthwhile at the end of the tunnel of our darkness. The light that shines through our darkness is
the birth of Christ in our own life. We
study how to find the moment we’re in alive with the fullness of God’s life. We realize that God is love, and each moment
of our living offers us the fullness of our life. We look at each moment to see where our Lord
is calling us, and each moment reflects something about who we’re meant to be
in Christ.

Action

The journey
that I’m going to take for Christ begins each day. Each day is a nativity of the rest of my life.
The wonder of the ordinary becoming
extraordinary is the truth that only the ordinary is extraordinary in the
kingdom of God. Each moment of life
reflects His presence in our life. How
we come alive to what we can do for another is the beauty of Christ being one
of us. It is in the birth of Christ that
we discover the closeness that we have to Christ. In his relationship to his parents, we know as
the child was growing up that the fullness of life is responding to parents’
dreams for us. Epiphany is not simply
the permission to take the long view of life; it’s the appreciation that being
on the journey is what makes life worthwhile. We pick our goal to find Christ even as the
wise men and know that we are the wise men of today. Getting lost in our journey might subject us
to asking bad advice; people’s motives are not pure—Herod wanted to protect his
kingship.The wise men weren’t so wise
when they asked Herod, “Where is this king who has been born?” Epiphany is the call on our hearts to search
the Christ of the present moment in which we are experiencing. The truth of our journey is the reality that
our goal is being on the journey, not getting there. It is ok to do for others what will give them
something to finish in our name. Making up
the difference is the reality of a prayer that can make sense out of all our
failures by giving them a deeper meaning. Epiphany is our challenge to respond to the
light that is the star the wise men followed. We need to know our stars—that is the message of epiphany.